Weaponising SIR

The existence of bogus voters in the electoral rolls prepared by the Election Commission of India (ECI) has always been an issue that causes concern as it vitiates the polling process - the soul of democracy.

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Added to this vicious circle is the presence of names of the same voter in multiple constituencies with fake addresses. The latest disclosure of the manipulation of the electoral machinery in a pilot project by the Congress in a Karnataka Assembly constituency has exposed the rot that has crept into the Election Commission (ECI) and the electoral system. The ECI has not been convincing enough in its response and denial of the purported malpractice. However, it has undertaken with gusto the task of removing the names of voters who are either dead or figure in more than one constituency. This Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise of electoral rolls is supposedly one step further from the practice of revision of electoral rolls being followed from time to time for decades. The first experiment of the SIR in Bihar has been done under clouded circumstances and many questions about its mechanism and intent still remain unanswered. This is for the simple reason that in the name of SIR the ECI has effectively taken upon itself the task of determining the citizenship of the country’s people, whereas its main remit is to include citizens’ names in the voter list and not to exclude existing ones. Over the years, the ECI has earned accolades for deploying tens of thousands of personnel to physically visit houses throughout the length and breadth of the couniry to enlist names in the voters’ list.